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North shore residents learn to cut clutter to reduce stress

29wtcclutter

Camellia Gardens' Audrey Baker, seminar speaker Cheryl Frager, and participant Christel Roesch discuss the joys of clutter-free living after a recent seminar on organizational skills that was hosted by the retirement community. (Photo by Suzie Hunt)

"Sorting is the most difficult part of moving, but the most necessary," said Cheryl Frager.

Collected clutter, and the effects it has on productivity and peace of mind, was the subject of a recent seminar hosted by Camellia Gardens Retirement Community. Cheryl Frager, owner of Smooth Transitions of Southern Louisiana, a company specializing in home organization and move management, discussed how many people find themselves with full homes, saving things for a rainy day, and then drowning in clutter.

When emotions override common sense and people become trapped by the huge scale of their belongings, a crisis is looming, she said.

Frager started the seminar by giving audience members a “Finding Your Clutter Quotient” survey, bringing laughter and a few embarrassed glances from the seminar’s participants. Having to answer with responses from ‘almost never’ to ‘all the time’, the questions ranged from ‘ I save magazines with interesting articles/recipes’ to “I keep bills, bank statements and other mail in piles until I have time to file’, to ‘I can’t bear to part with things and I consider myself a pack rat’.

Many survey respondents' scores put them in the higher clutter category, indicative of a problem that’s been building for some time and in need of clutter-busting.

“We work with a lot of older people who are looking to move and downsize to a smaller residence. It is difficult for some to go through their belongings and choose what to take with them to their new home and what to discard,” said Frager.

The average 2,000-square-foot household requires an average of 1,000 hours of sorting time prior to a downsizing move. When going through every room, closet and the attic, residents must decide what to keep, what to give away to family members, what to donate to charity, and what to discard, according to Frager.

“We spend decades accumulating stuff in our homes,” said Frager. “It is important to us, and we can be emotional about many of the things in our homes. Sorting is the most difficult part of moving, but the most necessary.”

People from earlier generations were raised to use items until they were used up, she remarked. Asking how many people have cans of McCormick spices in their kitchen cabinets, several hands were raised. “With the exception of black pepper, McCormick stopped using metal tins for their spices in the late 1990’s. They expired a long time ago, so feel free to throw them out,” Frager said, coaxing the audience.

Another example was provided by a woman who called her company for help in moving. When the staff members arrived, they found the woman had accumulated more than 900 pairs of shoes, all stored neatly in a multitude of closets throughout her house.

“Those shoes held a lot of memories for her. We sat with her while she talked and shared, and then we worked with her through the process of letting go. The important thing to remember in all this is that your memories are not in your stuff, but in your heart,” said Frager. When the staff members left, the woman had kept four pairs of shoes and donated the rest to a battered women’s shelter.

Another hot topic for discussion was the phenomenon of grown children leaving a multitude of memorabilia and clothing behind when they move out, leaving Mom and Dad’s house to serve as their own personal storage unit. Removing these items from the home is one of the easiest ways for parents to declutter their homes, she said.

“Once a grown child has a place of their own, it’s OK to reunite them with their stuff,” she said, professing that she had recently put her foot down with her own son. After asking him to sort through his stuff at her house during several visits met with little response, she boxed all of it up and gave him a one month deadline to make a decision.

Frager offered several tips to start a de-cluttering program in the home:

Don’t try to do de-clutter the entire house in one day. Break up the work into smaller increments of 15 minutes to an hour and in once specific location like a closet or kitchen counter.

If you haven’t used or worn an item for a year or more, donate it to a local charity so that someone else can enjoy it and the charity can benefit from its sale.

Take advantage of electronic gadgets that can scan in photos, receipts and paperwork into your computer and reduce the amount of paper sitting in stacks and in filing cabinets.

Make a plan of what you would like to accomplish and a time table to get it done.

“I got a lot out of this talk; it gives me hope,” said participant Christel Roesch. “What she said about having a method and implementing it, I’m ready to make a plan and do it. I believe I’ll get results.”

Camellia Gardens sponsored the seminar because it has become a topic of interest around the country, as well as to seniors who plan to downsize or move into senior housing.

“We have such an emotional attachment to things, and it helps to know how to deal with them before they become a burden,” said Audrey Baker, Camellia Gardens’ Director of Business Development. The retirement community will be offering another seminar in early 2014 concerning the importance of Spring cleaning to leading a clutter-free life. For more information concerning future seminars, contact Baker at 985.781.0072.